"Sourdough is something that can be complicated but the Moro recipe just works. You don't need a restaurant kitchen for it, and it's not that much effort if you're into bread making. Sourdough is such a wonderful thing. You can toast it, make bruschetta, put it in a soup. If I've got a loaf of sourdough in the freezer, I can feed any number of people.

Moro: The Cookbook helped familiarise sourdough but it did more than that. It really hit a nerve – Middle Eastern and Spanish food had really been popularised for a while and it came around the same time as everyone in this country was getting into food. It was full of interesting and exotic ingredients but the Clarks bothered to talk about them, such as the boxes of sumac. And they included that amazing appendix of where to get everything.

I got the book when I was living in my first flat in Shepherd's Bush, near all the Middle Eastern shops on the Uxbridge Road. Everything was right there, all the yoghurts, the big bundles of coriander. I would buy the spices and talk to the shopkeepers about what I was cooking, ask them how they did it. A good cookbook can break down barriers like that. Everything I've cooked from this book has so much flavour – like the fattoush, which they did when no one was making fattoush. I cooked the garlic, chilli and aubergine salad from Moro, with a few of my own touches, for my Masterchef audition [Miers won Masterchef in 2005]. I bought the book for my father and between us we've cooked around 70% of the recipes."